Douglas Sirk AWard Winner 2018: Jafar Panahi

This year’s Douglas Sirk Award goes to Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has been sentenced to a 20-year ban on working and travelling. Before the German premiere of Panahi's latest film Three Faceshis daughter, Solmaz Panahi, together with the leading actress of the film, Behnaz Jafari, will receive the award in Hamburg.

Iranian cinema has had a permanent place at FILMFEST HAMBURG since 2001, showing films by directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Abofazl Jalili, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Ashgar Farhadi and Mohammad Rasoulof, who now has close ties to Hamburg. Festival director Albert Wiederspiel: »In 2009 we visibly supported the Green Iranian opposition movement, whose figurehead was Panahi, from Hamburg. In 2013 Jafar Panahi curated the section >Iran Deluxe< for us, sharing his personal milestones of Iranian cinema, and we showed his films The Circle, This Is Not a Film, The Accordion and Closed Curtain at FILMFEST HAMBURG. So it is long overdue, and in these times, in which more and more system-critical artists and journalists all over the world are being detained, locked away and prevented from working, it is absolutely necessary to honour this courageous director for his artistic work.«

Since 1995, the Douglas Sirk Award has been given as part of FILMFEST HAMBURG to personalities who have made a special contribution to film culture and the film industry. Clint Eastwood was the first to accept this award, a crystal designed by Hamburg designer Georg Plum.

The eponym of the award is Douglas Sirk, who was born as Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg. He emigrated to the USA in 1937 and initially tried his luck as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Sirk celebrated his first success as a director with the melodrama 'Summer Storm'. In the following years, he filmed other successful films from this genre, including 'Written on the Wind', 'A Time to Love and a Time to Die' and 'Imitation of Life'.